The latest Apple patent filing to excite the Mac masses shows the manufacturer's iMac recast as a docking station for a MacBook laptop.
Apple's been here before, of course, with its Duo range of PowerBooks, launched in 1992. Unlike standard PowerBooks, the Duos were designed to dock into a Mac-like desktop unit that improved the …

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Claim 5. "A docking station as recited in claim 1, wherein the docking area is configured such that a plane parallel to at least one largest face of an imaginary rectangular polyhedron of the least possible volume that can contain the portable computer docked in the housing is more parallel than normal to the direction of gravity."

Once you've finished guffawing at the patentese, it looks like what they're claiming novelty for is the fact that it holds the laptop vertically behind the screen, rather than horizontally. Not that I'm saying this should necessarily be patentable, of course.

Urmm...

So....this is basically an iMac without the Mac part, and just a enlarged monitor with a connector an port...all well and good. And they are going to close, and insert a full scale Macbook into it, with very little ventilation? As in...the things which tend to get rather warm and have rather "fun and innovative" flamability?

So, due to what these things tend to run like, am sure what Apples patented here is the spinkler system along the top of the panel which its surely going to need :P

There are new claims they want to protect

Anyone who's actually written patents knows that patents are incremental, and any sort of new work needs to be patented if it's going to be afforded the protection of the patent system. An integrated display and a low-footprint vertical dock are both new, and the integrated display itself makes it a much more different beast than current and former docking solutions. Also, remember that many patents cover things which are obvious-in-retrospect, but can anyone complaining about the patentability of this innovation honestly say they came up with this idea first?

Also, the DuoDock did more than just improve the video and audio; it also had slots for its own RAM and FPU, to actually vastly improve the capabilities of laptops (back when RAM densities were so low and FPUs were so large that they actually made a noticeable impact on the size of the notebook).

Apple at it again

I thought patents are supposed to protect innovation and new ideas? This is as dubious as Apples patent application for an 'extra wide' mousepad for their laptops. So now patents are for 'take an existing idea, tweak it slightly and it becomes a whole new patentable product'? The whole system needs rebuilding from scratch